The Village
Length: 2 hours
Studio: Touchstone Pictures
Website: http://thevillage.movies.go.com/main.html
Release Date: 2004-07-30
Cast: Judy Greer, Bryce Dallas Howard, William Hurt, Joaquin Phoenix, Adrien Brody
Director: M. Night Shyamalan
Screenwriter: M. Night Shyamalan
WorkNameSort: The Village
Our Rating: 3.50
Sticking up for M. Night Shyamalan flicks is a risky business – remember how much you initially enjoyed Signs, only to realize a week or so later that it was the stupidest goddamn story ever put to celluloid? Time will tell if a similar consensus attaches itself to The Village, the tale of a precarious standoff between an isolated 19th-century community and inhuman creatures known only as Those We Don’t Speak Of. (Nader voters? No, but good guess.) There’s also a romance plot starring a taciturn young man (Joaquin Phoenix) and a noble blind girl (Bryce Dallas Howard, soulful but not always convincing as a sightless person). Oddly enough, this is the least suspenseful of Night’s movies, yet there are at least two killer story twists. They’re bound to be torn apart by killjoys, so I take perverse pride in admitting that they caught me totally by surprise; anyway, the writer/director seems to have indemnified himself against excessive nit-picking by setting up the entire film as a grand allegory for the interdependence of love and fear. At least, that’s the way it looks right now. Check back with me in a week.
This article appears in Aug 4-10, 2004.